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NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
 April 4, 2012
NASA's Kepler mission has been approved for extension through fiscal year 2016 based on a recommendation from the Agency’s Senior Review of its operating missions.
  April 3, 2012
NASA has selected six planet hunters as the recipients of the 2012 Carl Sagan Exoplanet Postdoctoral Fellowships, named after the late astronomer. The fellowship was created to inspire the next generation of explorers seeking to learn more about planets, and possibly life, around other stars.
 March 14, 2012
NASA's Kepler mission has been named the winner of the 2012 Aviation Week Laureate Award in the Space category, announced March 7 at the 55th annual black-tie awards dinner in Washington.
 February 3, 2012
Kepler discoveries have been recognized as some of the biggest astrophysics news stories of the year.
 January 11, 2012
Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun.The smallest is about the size of Mars.
 January 11, 2012
Our Milky Way galaxy contains a minimum of 100 billion planets, according to a detailed statistical study based on the detection of three planets located outside our solar system, called exoplanets.
 January 6, 2012
Seager featured as one of Nature's "10 people who mattered this year."
 December 14, 2011
"Star Wars gets real" - Time features Kepler 16b as #3 on list of "Top 10 Space Moments of 2011"
 December 6, 2011
Kepler project manager Roger Hunter is profiled in the latest edition of the Washington Post's "Federal Insider"
 December 5, 2011
NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the "habitable zone," the region around a star where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates.
 November 11, 2011
Numerous exoplanet-related sessions and events will be happening at the 219th AAS meeting in Austin, TX. Click to see more.
 October 3, 2011
NASA has selected 11 science proposals, including three related to exoplanets, for evaluation as potential future science missions.
 August 29, 2011
NExScI scientists Drs. Stephen Kane and Dawn Gelino have launched a web site called The Habitable Zone Gallery. This site is a new service to the exoplanet community which provides Habitable Zone (HZ) information for each of the exoplanetary systems with known planetary orbital parameters.
 August 23, 2011
Astronomers have discovered that the dwarf planet 2007 OR10—nicknamed Snow White—is an icy world, with about half its surface covered in water ice that once flowed from ancient, slush-spewing volcanoes.
 May 27, 2011
A group of MIT students led by Sara Seager have developed a CubeSat designed to search for planets orbiting sunlike stars.
 May 23, 2011
Today Kepler team is announcing another member of the Kepler-10 family, called Kepler-10c - validated using a combination of a computer simulation technique called "Blender," and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
 May 18, 2011
Astronomers, including a NASA-funded team member, have discovered a new class of Jupiter-sized planets floating alone in the dark of space, away from the light of a star. The team believes these lone worlds were probably ejected from developing planetary systems.
 April 7, 2011
Astronomers have come up with a new way of identifying close, faint stars with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer satellite. The technique should help in the hunt for planets that lie beyond our solar system, because nearby, hard-to-see stars could very well be home to the easiest-to-see alien planets.
 March 29, 2011
NASA has selected five potential discoverers as the recipients of the 2011 Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowships, named after the late astronomer. The Carl Sagan Fellowship takes a theme-based approach, in which fellows will focus on compelling scientific questions, such as "Are there Earth-like planets orbiting other stars?"
 February 14, 2011
Wall Street Journal's Michael Kofsky reports on Kepler's potential for finding a habitable exoplanet (video).
 February 2, 2011
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered its first Earth-size planet candidates and its first candidates in the habitable zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface. Five of the potential planets are near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of smaller, cooler stars than our sun.
 January 11, 2011
The Kepler mission has announced the discovery of Kepler 10b, the smallest exoplanet yet discovered and the first rocky world discovered by the Kepler mission.
 January 5, 2011
The WFIRST mission has selected its Science Definition Team (SDT) members, co-chaired by J. Green, Univ. of Colorado/CASA and P. Schechter, MIT (Co-Chair). For a full list of names, click here.
 December 8, 2010
Astronomers have discovered a fourth giant planet joining three others that, in 2008, were the subject of the first-ever pictures of a planetary system orbiting another star other than our sun.
 December 8, 2010
The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer has taken its first images of the star Beta Peg in the constellation Pegasus -- an encouraging start for an instrument designed to probe the cosmic neighborhoods where Earth-like planets could exist.
 November 9, 2010
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is pleased to announce that the first Lancelot M. Berkeley - New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy is being awarded to William J. Borucki and David G. Koch of the Kepler mission.
 September 30, 2010
The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) is pleased to announce a significant update to the NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (NStED). Each of the 210,000+ public Kepler light curves are integrated with the newly-released NStED periodogram service.
 August 31, 2010
NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet crossing in front of, or transiting, the same star.
 July 29, 2010
Michael Shao, an expert in the field of optical systems engineering and manager of JPL’s Interferometry Center of Excellence, has received the 2010 Michelson Prize from the International Astronomical Union and the Mount Wilson Institute.
 June 15, 2010
NASA's Kepler Mission has released 43 days of science data on more than 156,000 stars. These stars are being monitored for subtle brightness changes as part of an ongoing search for Earth-like planets outside of our solar system.
 April 1, 2010
Astronomers are planning the 6th in a series of major international exoplanet conferences, to be held in Flagstaff, Arizona. Mark your calendar for May 1-6, 2011, and sign up on the conference website for more information.
 March 31, 2010
Robert Krulwitch discusses "The Fruitless Search For Solar Systems Like Ours."
 February 4, 2010
NASA astronomers have successfully demonstrated that a David of a telescope can tackle Goliath-size questions in the quest to study Earth-like planets around other stars.
 January 7, 2010
Planet hunters using Keck Observatory have detected an extrasolar planet that is only four times the mass of Earth. The planet is the second smallest exoplanet ever discovered and adds to astronomers’ growing cadre of low mass planets called super-Earths.
 January 5, 2010
NStED now includes Spitzer IRS spectra, Keck-HIRES spectra donated from the planet-hunting program M2K, and photometric light curves of known transiting planets donated by amateur astronomers from around the world.
 December 9, 2009
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 October 21, 2009
Explore the history of planet hunting and the search for another Earth with this new interactive exoplanet timeline.
 July 27, 2009
The Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis group (ExoPAG) Meeting has been scheduled for January 2010, Washington, D.C.
 July 27, 2009
Exoplanet Community Report (PDF 6.8 MB) is now available. The Report was developed by community groups during and following the Exoplanet Forum held in Pasadena, in May 2008. Hardcopies are available upon request.
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